Americans argue about a lot of things. The rancor associated with those arguments
have, of late, become more vehement or, better stated, more bifurcated. That is, there has been a deep divide between
those Americans who believe in conservative ideals and ideas and those who sign
up for the liberal side of the debates.
It has taken on a more “my team” versus “their team” mode of thinking.
Among the
issues under contention is what to do with public schooling. In the name of providing choice – in opposition
to the current designation of where students go to school – different
strategies have been proposed so that parents have choice over where their kids
go. While conservatives voice this
choice rationale, liberals see it as various ways conservatives are attempting
to either end public schooling in this country or highly restrict it.
A bit of
context: Many countries have public
schools, but in a great deal of them, the public schools are merely there to
provide somewhere to put youngsters during the day. The quality of education is often so bad that
parents of any means readily send their students to private schools. This, at times, means significant sacrifice on
the part of parents to be able to pay the accompanying fees.
Since income and wealth in these
countries are highly maldistributed – a few wealthy households with a majority of
poor households – the vast number of students receive subpar education. This, of course, is not only hurtful of those
students, but to the overall welfare of those countries. This is further intensified if one considers
how the global economy has become ever more based on technology in the age of
computers.
But back to the US. This debate over public schooling has a long
history. Toni Marie Massaro[1] reports since
the nation’s earliest days, education was considered a private affair. It was to be a household effort, especially
of the father’s. Maybe, the local church
had a role. Overall, the effort was
practical and sectarian. This, as is
readily detectable, changed, but the evolution from what existed then to what
exists today is a telling story as to what some are hoping for the future.
As the nation was settling into to
its now familiar form of governance, a movement got started for the common
school. That is, in the late 1700s,
Americans turned to the possibility of a compulsory, publicly payed-for system. There were two sources for this and both them
disagreed with each other as to the purpose and process such a system should
take.
Most Americans did not give this
issue any thought. Of those who did some
fell into a highly sectarian view.
Ignorance, especially of religious beliefs, was seen as a benefit for
Satan. This view was mostly coming out
of the Puritanical areas of the country, New England, especially
Massachusetts. The remedy to address
this gift to Satan was a compulsory school system. The aim, through a strong sectarian approach,
was both to improve the fate of young people and of the overall community.
The other, pro-compulsory education
argument can be traced to Thomas Jefferson.
His argument was a great less sectarian and more practical than that of
Massachusetts. He, who was well versed
in the prior attempts at self-governing (especially from classical times), was
convinced that republican government could not survive unless the populous was
sufficiently educated. This more secular
reasoning found little support among his fellow leaders in Virginia. Public schooling would have to wait quite a
few decades before it would become real in that area of the country.
In addition, terms such as
compulsory, common, and public – not to mention education itself – needed to be
defined so as to allow for appropriate policy to be formulated and
implemented. That proved difficult as
their general meanings were clear enough to threaten the interests of various
factions in those early years.
The most obvious was the interests of
the wealthy who would pay for private education for their children regardless
of whether there was a public system or not.
Why, they would ask, should they pay taxes to educate other people’s
children? On the surface, there were no
reasons. Initially, Jefferson’s argument
was not convincing enough.
Less obvious was the resistance
expressed by religious groups including the churches themselves. They found any attempt to secularize
education would be to secularize moral training. This was considered to be anti-religion by
many Americans. As it turned out, up
until the 1960s, resulting public school curriculum favored moral instruction
and that instruction relied on a Protestant view of the subject.
This was so much the case that the
Roman Catholic Church initially objected to such instruction and later began
their own education system – the parochial schools of the Catholic Church. In full disclosure, this writer is a product,
through high school, of that system (except for a few months at the end of his
fourth-grade year).
Since the sixties, public education
has mostly abandoned their efforts at moral training.[2] This puts a crimp in the initial arguments
for public schools. This is true if one
were to agree with the Massachusetts argument or the Jefferson argument. This is what Massaro writes on this point:
Common schooling in common subjects
and common values thus always has been a critical component of American
progressivist dreams, but the ideal structure for the delivery of that
education and the ideal content of these common lessons have always been
contested. Moreover, the disagreements
have tended to reflect deep-seated political, religious, and philosophical
conflicts among the various progressivist movements.[3]
This ongoing source for debate continues to the present
day. Future posting on this subject will
pick up this history with the contributions of Horace Mann.
